Look at More: A Proven Approach to Innovation, Growth, and Change

The second purpose of the inventory is to reveal gaps in knowledge among the people who will be creating. In other words, you'll be able to see how literate people are around the topic at hand. If all they see in a library is buildings and books, they don't really know much about libraries. But if they can come up with a list like the one above, th

First, doing so forced us to find hidden elements that we might otherwise overlook.

There are two main reasons why we spent so much time putting these lists together.

Emotional characteristics are the feelings and emotions people have about whatever it is that they're using (and how they feel if they can't have it).

Functional characteristics describe less tangible qualities—how something is used and whether people use it the way it was intended or come up with something completely different on their own.

Physical characteristics are pretty straightforward—obvious descriptive attributes, such as heavy, square, hard, blue, and so on.

What we're doing here is assessing three types of characteristics to find the components with the most opportunities for delivering growth and change:

but an essential first step is to create lists of the characteristics that define the issue or objective.

One: Lists, More Lists, and Even More Lists